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Title:
Some recent developments in non-perturbative quantum gravity
Speaker:
Abstract:
A theory of “Quantum gravity” refers to a unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity. We have good reason to believe that our world is described by just such a theory, although known models (meaning string theories) predict new physics at extremely high energy, well outside of the reach of experiments for the foreseeable future. That being said, from a purely theoretical perspective, known models of quantum gravity are still incredibly rich and complicated, and much of what is known comes from low orders in perturbation theory. In this talk I will discuss recent theoretical progress in simple, “stripped-down” models of quantum gravity in two and three spacetime dimensions. These models are much simpler than gravity in our four-dimensional universe, but from the point of view of a theorist they have the appealing feature of being calculable, sometimes in a perturbative expansion and sometimes exactly as a function of the gravitational interaction. I will summarize some known facts about these models, as well as what they are teaching us about black holes and quantum cosmology. Along the way I will also point out some surprising connections with symplectic geometry and random matrix theory.
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